“Come on,” Brady said, motioning with the light. Their shadows bounced crazily from the ceiling and the walls and the shiny white water heater. For an instant, Kyle felt dizzy and sick. But there was no time to worry about shadows. Brady was already through an open door-open? — and playing the light across dark wood cabinets.
The kitchen.
Kyle shuddered and followed.
6
He caught up to Brady and put his hand on Brady’s shrouded arm.
“We been inside, okay. Now let’s go.”
Brady flicked the penlight off for an instant. When he turned it on again, he was holding it against his chin, the light spilling upward across his face, half swathed with wrappings, the other half scarred and shadowed with his mother’s best lipstick and eye shadow.
Kyle yelped, knowing all the time that he was being silly, that it was only Brady showing off, but frightened nonetheless. He fingered his silver six-shooters, wishing that they were real, that he was a real Texas Ranger and not afraid of anything.
Brady turned the light away and started moving through the kitchen.
“Hey Brade, how ’bout it? Huh? Let’s go.”
Brady swiveled and thrust the light beneath his chin again and spoke in a low whisper that almost made Kyle wet his pants. “Velcome to my castle. My name is Drrraaacuuula!”
It was the wrong line, given Brady’s choice of costume, but neither boy cared. Kyle was too frightened by the darkness and the eerie shadows and the coldness and the sense that he had better get out of there right now. Brady was just having too much fun to worry. He disappeared into the living room.
Kyle watched for a second, debating whether or not to back on out through the garage and head down Oleander toward the welcoming lights. But as the cabinets and fixtures in the kitchen disappeared and matching shadows began bobbing on the bit of the living room wall he could see through the walkway, he knew that he wouldn’t, couldn’t go back, not alone. Not without the light, puny as it was. There was that water heater, after all, that just might not really be a water heater, not any more. And the blood on the concrete that just might really be blood. He started after Brady.
By that time Brady was turning another corner into the hallway. The living room was empty, its blank walls and high, open-beam ceiling looming as vast as an aircraft hanger in the darkness.
Kyle half-ran across the room, noting vaguely the shuffling sound of his feet on unworn carpet. He caught up to Brady just as the other boy was shining the light into the first opening along the hall.
A bathroom. The toilet and sink glowed ghostly pale. The shadow line on the tub wavered and quivered, and it didn’t take much for Kyle to imagine the porcelain half full of something dark and thick and oily that wasn’t oil and that might hide…
He backed out, pulling Brady with him. The door opposite opened into a bedroom. It was empty. Kyle was relieved to see that the closet door was tightly shut. No shadows. No bogeymen hiding in there. A bit of light from the houses down the hill came through the dust-caked window, dimming the tiny penlight even more. The corner room was another bedroom. It was empty too.
Brady flashed the light along the final stretch of hallway. Three…no, four doors. Two closed, one open just enough for the difference in colors to suggest a slit of black caught between two larger surfaces. And one wide open.
“Brady,” Kyle said, not caring how much fear came through in his voice. “Come on. Let’s go!” He was whining, he knew it. He heard the childishly petulant tones he used (not always successfully) on Mom and Dad when they wanted one thing and he wanted another. And right now, he wanted another thing more than he had even thought possible. He wanted to leave.
But Brady didn’t, and Brady had the light even if it was Kyle’s light to begin with and the…the creep wouldn’t give it back.
“Just one more room,” Brady said over his shoulder, already partway down the hall. His mummy-strips trailed a foot or two behind him.
If he had thrown his weight a bit to the left or right and dragged his other foot in the lurching gait both boys knew instinctively that mummies had to use, Kyle would have broken away. He would have run for the front door, the bedroom window, anywhere to get out of this place.
But Brady didn’t. He hunched over slightly, his shoulders rounded enough for the light to reflect off the top of his bandages. But he walked straight and true toward the open door on the right at the end of the hall. He was nearly there when Kyle did finally break out of his panic and run to catch up. So they were standing nearly shoulder to shoulder when Brady thrust his arm out, penlight clenched in his fist, and arced the light through the room.
The two boys shrieked as one, a long, breathless eruption of high-pitched, squealing sound.
This time there was no question about what they saw.
The air was heavy and cold. Both of the boys caught the dank odor and, even without having smelled it before, at least not in such quantities, certainly not smeared like thick, clotting paint on the walls and doors and windows and carpets-even with their limited experience with it oozing out of nice, neat little cuts on shins and fingers or rough scrapes on elbows and knees, they recognized it.`
Blood.
Everywhere. Walls, floor, window, closet doors.
There was even a spattering of drops on the white ceiling. They looked brown, almost black, in the yellowish light.
Kyle’s mouth dropped open. Brady’s opened as well, closed, opened, closed. Finally he squeaked out a faint, “Holy shit.” He started to step into the room, but Kyle caught his arm in a vice-like grip that approximated a dead- man’s grasp.
“No,” he whispered hoarsely, as if the inside of his throat had been sliced away and then scabbed and scarred and distorted, and he would have to learn to talk all over again. “Don’t.”
“But we gotta…”
“We gotta get someone. This ain’t play. This is real,” Kyle said.
For once Brady didn’t argue, didn’t try to have the last word. He nodded. But instead of retreating down the hall, he took a long step…inside the room.
He turned the penlight to the windows. No light penetrated from the cars on the freeway only a mile or so away. No lights penetrated from the houses that dotted the valley floor. The window was painted over with crusted blood, all except for a corner of the farthest pane. There, the night lights glimmered faintly through a jagged break that might have been made by a small rock or a carelessly tossed elm branch…or a balled-up fist.
Brady dropped the beam to scan the floor beneath the break. A few shards of glass glinted back at him but nothing more. He could see no pieces large enough to fill in the hole in the pane. He moved one step closer to the glass, then turned enough to play the light on the walls. Great swathes of dark stuff spattered the smooth surfaces. They weren’t regular-no letters in blood or anything like that. Just spurts of dripping stuff.
He backed away, swallowing. Kyle wanted to call out something to remind Brady that they were going to get out of there, but before he found his voice, Brady took one step too many. His shoulder bumped the closet door. Something inside shifted with a hideous thump and the door swung open, knocking Brady to his knees just as something heavy and huge and matted and stinking struck him.
Kyle screamed as the thing erupted from the closet and enveloped his friend. Part of him wanted to run shrieking down the hall, but most of him found himself rushing forward, screaming anyway but at least trying to help Brady. Kyle slammed his fists at the unyielding shape. Underneath its monstrous bulk, he could hear Brady’s helpless whimpering-so unlike Brady, so chilling that this time nine-year-old Kyle did wet his brand-new black-and- silver cowboy suit. He felt the sudden warmness on his legs and smelled the stench of ammonia, but neither sensation penetrated his terror.
He wrenched his six-shooters from their holsters and smashed them butt-end first against the thing that was pinning Brady to the floor, again, again, again. His exposed wrist passed by the thing’s shadowed shoulders, and
